Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / Ficciones
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Goodman Gallery Cape Town proudly presents the first solo show in South Africa by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Ficciones centres around two related series of works that extend the artists’ pre-occupation with the role of representation in places of trauma and conflict.
The first, Afterlife, is a re-reading of a controversial photograph taken in Iran on 6 August 1979. This remarkable image, taken just months after the revolution, records the execution of 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners by firing squad. The image, which captures the decisive moment the guns were fired, was immediately reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the world. The following year it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and for the next 30 years its author was simply known as “Anonymous.” Only recently has the photographer’s identity been revealed as Jahangir Razmi, a commercial studio photographer working in the suburbs of Tehran.
The artists sought out and interviewed Razmi, and based on these discussions along with an examination of the 26 neglected images on the roll of film Razmi produced that day, they present a series of collages–an iconoclastic breakdown or dissection of the original image – that interrupts our relationship as spectators to images of distant suffering.
The second series of works, American Landscapes, takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally “made.” In these occasionally abstract photographs the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. The artists refer to these spaces as ‘scenography for a free market economy’ or simply ‘Landscapes’. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.
Adam Broomberg (b. SA, 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (b. UK, 1971) have been collaborating for over a decade on works and publications that in different ways examine the language of documentary photography. Together they have produced six monographs, and have exhibited in many of the world’s most prestigious museums including the V&A, the Stedelijk Museum, The Photographer’s Gallery, Circullo des Bellas Artes, The International Center of Photography and The Hasselblad Center.